Conventionally, semiconductor manufacturing techniques have sought to reduce chip manufacturing unit prices by increasing wafer diameters. For this reason, semiconductor manufacturing devices used in a series of manufacturing processes have continued to become larger and gone on a path of rising prices, thus increasing scales of manufacturing plants, and construction and operation costs. Such a large-scale manufacturing system may contribute to a reduction of manufacturing unit prices for small-lot large volume production of chips, but may hardly respond to demands for small-volume multi-kind production, making it difficult to adjust a production volume in accordance with a market situation and also making new entries by small-to-medium-sized enterprises more difficult.
In order to solve these problems, there is a demand for a compact semiconductor manufacturing device capable of manufacturing a semiconductor chip at low cost using a small-diameter (e.g., having a diameter of 20 mm or less) semiconductor wafer. When a production line is constructed using such a compact semiconductor manufacturing device, a plurality of semiconductor manufacturing devices are arranged on a floor surface in parallel in a straight line and a semiconductor wafer is accommodated in a wafer transport container and transported between the plurality of semiconductor manufacturing devices in a series of manufacturing processes on the semiconductor wafer (e.g., see Japanese Patent Applications Laid Open No. 2014-110358 and No. 2014-110359).
In the production line made up of a plurality of the semiconductor manufacturing devices, in order to efficiently advance the series of manufacturing processes on the semiconductor wafer, the wafer transport container needs to be transported automatically among the plurality of semiconductor manufacturing devices. To do so, one set of transport rails may be arranged in the vicinity of the production line over an overall length of the production line and the wafer transport container may be transported among the plurality of semiconductor manufacturing devices using the transport rails.